I honestly think that pointing to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is a red herring. It's an attractive distraction which is a bone tossed to the conspiracy theorists, when there are actual profit motives where you can simply follow the money and connect the dots. As far as I can tell, it is the fact that we had two weak puppets for heads of state in the UK (Boris Johnson) and the USA (Donald Trump) at the time this crisis struck. This allowed the most powerful country in Europe - Germany - to propose the policy structure. German hard science research has won quite a few Nobel prizes, but frankly corporations call the shots in public policy making over there. This year has been extremely profitable for them. This woman (co founder of Pfizer Biontech) became a billionaire this year. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96zlem_T%C3%BCreci The two heavyweights that Berlin's Angela Merkel administration is always sending onto television are Jens Spahn, whose husband is deeply involved a company which makes the only officially sanctioned type of mask which people are supposed to use in Germany in public spaces. https://www.dw.com/en/germanys-health-minister-under-scrutiny-over-mask-purchases/a-56946274 And Christian Drosten, who was deeply involved in the development of the PCR test. https://www.thomaskubo.de/files/pdf/Corodok1_PCREnglish.pdf The number of positive PCR tests have been announced on German television literally every day over the past eighteen months. It is COMPLETELY disingenuous to rely on these numbers for things like lockdown strategies, because ALL respiratory viruses will spread throughout the population at the same rate as this one has. If we had done this thorough testing in past years for the various bugs that come out of China we would have seen the exact same phenomenon. COVID-19 is more dangerous, but I think the panic caused by the mass media and lack of intelligent communication with the primary care physicians have been the major factors in the death toll That said, the masks and the tests being used as primary public policy measures worldwide have CERTAINLY made Christian Drosten and Jens Spahn heaps of cash. Another intriguing German-American connection which came together this year: The Evangelical Church of America suddenly decided in mid April to start a "full court press" (basketball metaphor) by saying that being "anti-mask" and "anti-vaccine" were bonafide religious convictions, when in actuality the concerns that they were pointing to have been constantly raised by respected medical professionals in Germany which Berlin simply turns a deaf ear, too. The Evangelical Church borrowed their (and other European academics') insights without attribution. It was interesting to see "silly season" (as Barack Obama calls it) start in America as the letter writing campaigns began to convince Republicans in Washington DC and elsewhere that political gains could be made.